The sounds of seas in space

On 14 January 2005 the Huygens space probe landed on Titan, the surface of which had previously been obscured by smog. This exercise was undertaken prior to the probe’s successful landing, in an attempt to calculate the sounds which would be associated with splashdowns and methane-falls, in the hypothetical scenario that (of the many sensing systems on Huygens) only the acoustic information was available in order to interpret conditions on Titan. The exercise includes innovations in the inversion of bubble entrainment noise to estimate bubble populations, and illustrates the benefits of using acoustics for space exploration.

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